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Cider Digest #1836
Subject: Cider Digest #1836, 31 December 2013
From: cider-request@talisman.com
Cider Digest #1836 31 December 2013
Cider and Perry Discussion Forum
Contents:
Re: Conical fermenter (Dick Dunn)
Inexpensive spectrophotometry for cider testing (Bill Bevis)
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Digest Janitor: Dick Dunn
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Subject: Re: Conical fermenter
From: Dick Dunn <rcd@talisman.com>
Date: Fri, 27 Dec 2013 19:00:23 -0700
Rich Anderson wrote:
> Not sure how much of a cone is on a beer tank, but I like our conical wine
> tanks which have a shallow cone of about 6" on a 1000 gallon tank. The
> advantage, at least for a large tanks is the ease of cleaning since you can
> wash and drain all solids and wash water out the bottom valve...
Yes, the wash/drain is easy with the slope. But, Rich, do you find that
the lees will actually come out more-or-less completely when you start to
rack? What we found was that the bottom valve would only let us pull a
little bit of the lees; the rest stuck to the side of the cone. At that
point, the bottom valve would have allowed a decent-but-not-wonderful
racking: the flow across the lees to the bottom pulled some of them out.
But a racking arm on the valve just a few inches from the bottom did a
great job.
- --
Dick Dunn rcd@talisman.com Hygiene, Colorado USA
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Subject: Inexpensive spectrophotometry for cider testing
From: Bill Bevis <wbevis@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2013 12:48:55 -0600
A few years back, there was a question on the list about testing for TA,
and Andrew Lea said that spectrophotometers were sometimes used for this
kind of thing, but that those were hard to come by. I've been reading up
on a new, cheap ($40), DIY desktop spectrometer from Public Labs:
http://publiclab.org/wiki/dsk
There looks like there's a great deal of work on using near-infrared
spectrometers like this for testing wine
(http://www.thermo.com/eThermo/CMA/PDFs/Articles/articlesFile_24959.pdf,
http://publiclab.org/notes/warren/1-19-2012/wine-spectroscopy-adam-hasler)=
but I'm not finding anything online about how to interpret the readings
from one of these for testing cider. I'm assuming the process is similar
to wine for whatever you're trying to test (TA, pH, Brix, etc.), but
different enough to require some experimentation. Has anyone done any
work on this (Andrew Lea, I'm looking in your direction...)? Are there
more resources out there, or should I just get one and start some
batches?
Also, I live within driving distance of a large University library, so I
would love book/publication suggestions about this, if anyone knows any.
Bill Bevis
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End of Cider Digest #1836
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